... sunflowers, and more.

Since choreographer Moses Pendleton can’t bring his sprawling Connecticut garden to Des Moines, he’s doing the next best thing: Re-creating it Tuesday on the Des Moines Civic Center stage.

His world-famous dance company, Momix, will present 22 short works in a plant-themed program called “Botanica.” Performers will dance to a hodgepodge score, ranging from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” to Peter Gabriel, in a stagecraft world of costumes, video projections and giant puppetry by designer Michael Curry, a go-to guy for Disney, the Metropolitan Opera and Cirque du Soleil.

Sounds fancy, right? It is, but it all started in Pendleton’s garden.

“I just never tire of going out with my camera and exploring this mysterious universe right in my backyard,” he said the other day on the phone, after a morning walk with his new Nikon lens. “I was on my hands and knees photographing the last shards of ice crystals. I’m hanging on to winter as best as I can.”

Let him have it. We’ll take “Botanica” instead, which traces a plant’s entire life cycle through all that stuff you learned back in school: germination, photosynthesis, fruition and decay.

Much of the program was inspired by the thousands of sunflowers that surround the artist’s rambling Victorian farmhouse.

“When there’s a wind, that’s when I can get them dancing,” he said.

In 1971, Pendleton co-founded the dance company Pilobolus, which visited Des Moines two years ago. He spun off Momix a decade later, around the time he choreographed the closing ceremonies for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Since then he’s taken the company all over the world.

But the dancers still rehearse in an old barn across the road from his house. It’s a familiar setting for the artist, who grew up on a Vermont dairy farm. He got his first taste of showbiz while exhibiting his family’s cattle at the county fair.

He dusted off a groaner: “I’m more of a ‘cow-ographer’ than a choreographer.”

He is also a pack rat. He brings sunflowers into the house, where they dry out and drop their seeds. Which attract chipmunks and squirrels and mice. Which poop. Which has, on occasion, become the target of Pendleton’s camera, in abstract shots he compared to Jackson Pollock.